You know that cringing fear of being singled out by a comedian, or being asked to improvise? Turns out when there's no one around to watch you, it's a lot easier to play along. But those limitations fell away in the face of the drama I'd been conscripted into. Like other mixed-reality headsets, the HoloLens is very much a work in progress the virtual objects only exist inside a small field of your vision. I'm not going to tell you I turned into David Haller, but I'm also not going to tell you that I didn't start acting, at least a little bit, like a confused, brainwashed mutant.
The woman that I met in the narrow hallway inside didn't tell me that, though she simply slipped a Microsoft HoloLens over my head and began to question me: "Do you remember being here before?" "Are they coming after you?" There was no one else around. Haller is Legion's protagonist, a many-personalitied Marvel Comics mutant who can do everything from hear others' thoughts to manipulate objects with his mind, and the sterile white space was outfitted to look like a medical facility. But when the door opened and I stepped through, I realized why the bracelet had David Haller's name on it. All I knew is that someone outside had measured the distance between my pupils, jotted the number down on a hospital bracelet, and put the bracelet on my wrist. The small foliage-covered building, squatting on a grassy area between the San Diego Convention Center's Hall H and a neighboring hotel, betrayed nothing, other than the logo for the show Legion. When I did catch a glimpse of the future, though, it wasn't where I expected to find it. But for now, it felt a lot like being Wade Watts and his hand-me-down gear in Ready Player One: trying to see into tomorrow with yesterday's equipment. Next year at Comic-Con will likely have fewer cables, and a lot less minor discomfort. Google is bringing wireless, fully tracked VR headsets to market this year, and Oculus has shown prototypes of its own “standalone” headset. (As long as we're fantasizing, you could do away with cables altogether by suiting participants up with a backpack-mounted computer, as at The Void in Utah, but that's a setup and oversight nightmare even the Duffer Brothers wouldn't take on.)Īll these problems are, at least in theory, short-lived. Similarly, a much larger version of the Stranger Things experience exists, using a special tracking system that allows you to roam in a 400-square-foot area, but it’s simply not viable for accommodating massive crowds in a relatively small space.
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You could outfit the Blade Runner activation with a more powerful headset, but it would necessitate a high-powered PC under each seat, as well as a spaghetti box worth of snaking cables to contend with. When you’ve got hundreds or thousands of people flowing through your experience over three or four days, you need something stable, or at least manageable-and that means compromise. They’re shortcomings of VR at mass-scale events. They’re shortcomings of VR at mass-scale events.Īre these shortcomings of VR? No. While Waititi sat in Hall H talking about rectangles, people waited for upwards of three and a half hours to break out of that rectangle, to put on a headset for five minutes and freak out while Stranger Things' Demogorgon stalked them through a house.Īre these shortcomings of VR? No. But the longest lines, and the most overheard discussions, were reserved for VR activations.
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“Whatever’s inside that rectangle,” he said, “is all that matters.” Given the way virtual reality swept the pop-culture festival this year, though, he might have been the only person in San Diego who cared about staying inside the frame.Ĭomic-Con International is only partly about the panels and the show floor the rest of it, open to the public, comprises a seemingly endless array of fan-pandering setups that the marketing world calls “activations.” This year, fans could tackle a room-escape puzzle set in the world of The Expanse, or have their photos taken with a Snapchat-like filter that turned them into orcs from the Netflix movie Bright. At Marvel Studio’s Comic-Con panel on Saturday, director Taika Waititi answered a question about his upcoming film Thor: Ragnarok with a new spin on an old platitude.
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